A looming crash or a soft landing? Forecasting the future of the memory "industry"

Journal of Modern History

Volumn 81, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 122-158

  Rosenfeld, Gavriel D ^a  

^a FAIRFIELD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 62749089302     PISSN: 00222801     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/593157     Document Type: Review

References (230)

1. Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, Munich and Memory: Architecture, Monuments, and the Legacy of the Third Reich (Berkeley, 2000), and The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism (Cambridge, 2005).
2. See, e.g., Charles Maier, "A Surfeit of Memory? Reflections on History, Melancholy, and Denial," History and Memory, Fall/Winter 1993, 143;
3. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York, 1995), 8;
4. Kerwin Lee Klein, "On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse," Representations, Winter 2000, 127-50;
5. Jay Winter, "The Generation of Memory: Reflections on the 'Memory Boom' in Contemporary Historical Studies," Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 27, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 69-92.
6. See also Jay Winter, Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT, 2006).
7. Elazar Barkan refers to an "industry of memory" in The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices (Baltimore, 2000), 24.
8. See also Emily Rosenberg, A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory (Durham, NC, 2003), esp. chap. 6.
9. Francis Fukuyama, "The End of History?" National Interest, Summer 1989, 3-18.
10. See Walter Truett Anderson, "Let's Put an End to 'The End of Books," Pacific News Service, March 4, 1996, http://news. pacificnews.org/news/view-article.html? article-id= 446f3e3382a85b949e4f574c3391a22f.
11. In making this assertion, I do not wish to be misunderstood as a proponent of this development, let alone an enabler of it. Indeed, I hope to preempt any suspicion that I am somehow aiming to undermine the study of memory by emphasizing that all of my current research and much of my projected research remains focused on the subject of memory in one way or another. See Gavriel D. Rosenfeld and Paul Jaskot, eds., Beyond Berlin: Twelve German Cities Confront the Nazi Past (Ann Arbor, MI, 2008). I am also currently at work on a new project tentatively entitled Building after Auschwitz: Jewish Architecture and Jewish Memory since the Holocaust.
12. Jan-Werner Müller, "Introduction: The Power of Memory, the Memory of Power, and the Power over Memory," in Memory and Power in Postwar Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past, ed. Jan-Werner Müller (Cambridge, 2002), 18;
13. Nancy Wood, Vectors of Memory: Legacies of Trauma in Postwar Europe (Oxford, 1999);
14. Natalie Zemon Davis and Randolph Starn, introduction to the special issue on memory in Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 1;
15. David Berliner, "The Abuses of Memory: Reflections on the Memory Boom in Anthropology," Anthropological Quarterly 78, no. 1 (2005): 203;
16. Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, CA, 2003), 27.
17. The first use of the "memory industry" that I have been able to locate is Michael Kammen's 1991 reference to the "memory industry" surrounding the commemoration of the Holocaust in Israel. Michael Kammen, The Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, 1991), 3.
18. Jay Winter, e.g., defines the memory "boom" as "the efflorescence of interest in the subject of memory inside the academy and beyond" (in short, what others have termed the academic memory "industry"): Winter, Remembering War, 1. Winter, moreover, argues that the current memory boom was preceded by a prior memory boom from 1890 to 1920, which dealt with the invention of national identities and the commemoration of the fallen of World War I. I find Winter's usage of the term "boom" for both phenomena unnecessarily confusing and argue that the fin de siècle interest in remembrance is better described by a different phrase that he uses in his analysis, namely, "cult of memory" (25-26). Overall, what makes the memory boom of the last two decades unique is the traumatic nature and global scope of the historical legacies that have been confronted during it.
19. I should stress that I do not use the term, "industry" in the mildly pejorative sense of some scholars whose use of it seems to imply that the field's practitioners have somehow lost sight of their original - purely intellectual - goals and instead have begun opportunistically to pursue baser aims, whether status or profit. Rather, I use the term "industry" more neutrally, as a term of reference for a successful and popular, if also profitable, subset of the larger world of academic publishing. I also do not wish to imply that the "industry" is narrowly devoted to studying only historical controversies; it has also focused on the larger dynamics of remembrance more broadly.
20. Huyssen, Twilight Memories, 26;
21. Winter, "Generation of Memory," 13.
22. For scholarly and journalistic uses of the phrase, see, among many others, Richard Ned Lebow, Wulf Kansteiner, and Claudio Fogu, eds., The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe (Durham, NC, 2006);
23. Alexandra Barahona De Brito, Carman Gonzalez Enriquez, and Paloma Aguilar, eds., The Politics of Memory: Transitional Justice in Democratizing Societies (Oxford, 2001);
24. Jane Kramer, The Politics of Memory: Looking for Germany in the New Germany (New York, 1996);
25. Raul Hilberg, The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian (New York, 2002);
26. Joan B. Wolf, Harnessing the Holocaust: The Politics of Memory in France (Stanford, CA, 2004);
27. Amos Elon, "The Politics of Memory," New York Review of Books, October 7, 1993.
28. Susan Suleiman, Crises of Memory and the Second World War (Cambridge, MA, 2006), 8.
29. Müller, "Introduction," 13.
30. See also Wulf Kansteiner, "Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies," History and Theory, May 2002, 180;
31. Patrick Hutton, History as an Art of Memory (Hanover, NH, 1993), 1.
32. Klein, "On the Emergence," 128;
33. Alon Confino, "Introduction," History and Memory 17, nos. 1-2 (2005): 7;
34. Maier, "Surfeit of Memory?" 142.
35. Klein, "On the Emergence," 144.
36. Scholars have been calling for a "history of memory" for over a decade now. See Hutton, History as an Art of Memory, 1;
37. Alon Confino, "Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method," American Historical Review, December 1997, 1403;
38. Peter Fritzsche, "The Case of Modern Memory," Journal of Modern History 73 (March 2001): 115. Valuable efforts to historicize memory include Richard Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca, NY, 1993);
39. David Gross, Lost Time: On Remembering and Forgetting in Late Modern Culture (Amherst, MA, 2000);
40. Harald Weinrich, Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting (Ithaca, NY, 2004);
41. Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, MA, 2004).
42. The concept of an unmastered past has been discussed most thoroughly in the vast literature on the German struggle to deal with the legacy of the Third Reich - a struggle that is frequently described by the German term Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or "mastering the past." For one of many examples, see Charles Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, MA, 1988). As for the controversial concept of "collective memory," I prefer not to get bogged down in a complicated discussion about terminology and will simply assert that I use the term loosely to encompass both "communicative" and "cultural" memories (i.e., both personally experienced and culturally mediated memories). Jan Assmann, "Kollektives Gedächtnis und kulturelle Identität," in Kultur und Gedächtnis, ed. Jan Assmann and Tonio Holscher (Frankfurt am Main, 1988). An unmastered past, of course, need not only refer to an unsettled legacy within a single society but can refer to a legacy that sparks disagreement among different societies as well.
43. Numerous scholars have used the term "silence" to describe the evasion of the past in various nations. Tom Segev uses the phrase "great silence" to describe the early postwar Israeli response to the Holocaust (The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust [New York, 1993], 10). Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider use the term to describe the early postwar decades in Germany, the United States, and Israel in their study The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (Philadelphia, 2006), 16-17.
44. See also Yasuko I. Takezawa, ed., Breaking the Silence: Redress and Japanese American Ethnicity (Ithaca, NY, 1995). The Freudian concept of "repression" has frequently been used by historians to refer to the evasion of the past. See, e.g., Henry Rousso's The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 (Cambridge, 1991), which uses the term "repressions" to refer to the early postwar French response to collaboration (60-98). The concept of repression remains controversial among scholars.
45. See Daniel Schacter, Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past (New York, 1996), 234-35.
46. Martha Minow's book Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence (Boston, 1999) offers a thoughtful typology of the legal, economic, symbolic, and commemorative methods that have been successfully used to come to terms with difficult pasts.
47. The postwar failure of various countries, such as Germany, Italy, and France, to remove the supporters of prewar and wartime dictatorial regimes after 1945 has been the subject of a large specialized literature, which I will not cite here.
48. For a general discussion, see Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York, 2005), chap. 2.
49. In the case of Germany, Jeffrey Herf's study Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanies (Cambridge, MA, 1997) and Robert Moeller's book War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley, 2003) clearly reveal the absence of "repression. " So too does Lawrence Baron's essay "The Holocaust and American Public Memory, 1945-1960," Holocaust and Genocide Studies 17, no. 1 (2003): 62-88, which describes the absence of repression in discussions of the Holocaust among American Jews in the early postwar period.
50. Eric Langenbacher alludes to this dynamic in "Changing Memory Regimes in Contemporary Germany?" German Politics and Society, Summer 2003, 52.
51. Hermann Lübbe earned considerable criticism for proposing this idea in the 1980s. Hermann Lübbe, "Der Nationalsozialismus im politischen Bewusstsein der Gegenwart," in Deutschlands Weg in die Diktatur: Internationale Konferenz zur Nationalsozialistischen Machtübernahme im Reichstagsgebäude zu Berlin, ed. Martin Broszat (Berlin, 1983), 329-49. More recently, it has been embraced by Tony Judt, "The Past Is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe," Daedalus, Fall 1992, 95-96.
52. See also Richard Bessel and Dirk Schumann, eds., Life after Death: Approaches to a Cultural and Social History of Europe during the 1940s and 1950s (Cambridge, 2003).
53. Ian Buruma, The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan (New York, 1994);
54. Joshua Fogel, ed., The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography (Berkeley, 2000);
55. Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking (New York, 1998);
56. Erna Paris, Long Shadows: Truth, Lies, and History (London, 2002), chap. 3.
57. Following the Civil War and the end of Reconstruction, American society's hasty pursuit of sectional reconciliation contributed to the emergence of a dominant white memory of the recent past that ignored the horrors of slavery. For more on this process, see Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory, chap. 4;
58. David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA, 2001);
59. William Blair, Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865-1914 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004);
60. W. Fitzhugh Brundage, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (Cambridge, MA, 2005). Similarly, early twentieth-century episodes of racial violence have disappeared from public memory, having been obscured by veils of silence, shame, and ignorance. Scott Ellsworth, Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1992);
61. Tim Madigan, The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (New York, 2001), esp. chap. 15;
62. Michael D'Orso, Like Judgement Day: The Ruin and Redemption of a Town Called Rosewood (New York, 1996). The persecution of Native Americans, meanwhile, was never really even conceptualized as a historic injustice. Steven Conn, History's Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 2004).
63. Claudio Fogu and Wulf Kansteiner address this point in their essay "The Politics of Memory and the Poetics of History," in Lebow, Kansteiner, and Fogu, Politics of Memory, 296-97.
64. For the generation of 1968, the presence of ex-Nazis, such as Chancellor Kurt-Georg Kiesinger, in the postwar state establishment; the passing of the emergency laws (Notstandsgesetze) by the parliament; and the heavy-handed police suppression of student protests confirmed its fears that the postwar Federal Republic was little different from the Nazi dictatorship.
65. For a convincing analysis of this generation's views of the Nazi past, see Nick Thomas, Protest Movements in 1960s West Germany: A Social History of Dissent and Democracy (Oxford, 2003).
66. On France, see Rousso, Vichy Syndrome, esp. chap. 3. In Italy, the 1968 generation criticized its elders in the center-left governing coalition for abandoning the wartime resistance's real revolutionary potential and for hiding the continuities between the fascist and postwar eras. See Claudio Fogu, "Italiani brava gente: The Legacy of Fascist Historical Culture on Italian Politics of Memory," in Lebow, Kansteiner, and Fogu, Politics of Memory, 149, 153-56.
67. W. Fitzhugh Brundage asserts that it has been "since the 1960s [that] ... the contest over ... the southern past... has entered the public arena more directly than at any time since Reconstruction" (Brundage, Southern Past, 313, 274). Native American demands for redress were already emerging in the early years after World War II but intensified after 1960 (Barkan, Guilt of Nations, 173 and, more generally, chap. 8).
68. John Torpey, "Making Whole What Has Been Smashed: Reflections on Reparations," Journal of Modem History 73 (June 2001): 352.
69. Various scholars have pointed to the importance of identity politics for the memory boom. See Maier, "Surfeit of Memory?" 144-47;
70. Klein, "On the Emer gence," 143;
71. Müller, "Introduction," 16;
72. Winter, Remembering War, 34-36. Pierre Nora has written that "those who have long been marginalized in traditional history are... haunted by the need to recover their buried pasts" (Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire," Representations 26 [Spring 1989]: 15). Barkan cites multiculturalism's promotion of the "neo-enlightenment" idea of group rights as influencing the subsequent emergence of the global restitution movement (Barkan, Guilt of Nations, 161).
73. Maier, "Surfeit of Memory?" 147;
74. Torpey, "Making Whole What Has Been Smashed," 241, 247.
75. Nora, "Between Memory and History."
76. The conservative thrust of Nora's project has been identified by Steven Englund in his review essay "The Ghost of Nation Past," Journal of Modern History 64 (June 1992): 299-320.
77. Rousso, Vichy Syndrome, 123.
78. Geoffrey H. Hartmann, ed., Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective (Bloomington, IN, 1986);
79. Maier, Unmasterable Past.
80. Barry Schwartz, "Introduction: The Expanding Past," Qualitative Sociology 19, no. 3 (1996): 277-78;
81. Klein, "On the Emergence," 144;
82. Winter, Remembering War, 33.
83. Perry Anderson's book The Origins of Postmodernity (London, 1998) cites the slow death of socialism in the wake of the failed 1968 revolutions as crucial for leading Western European intellectuals toward postmodern thought.
84. Many scholars have explored the implications of postmodernism for the field of history. See, e.g., Keith Jenkins, Re-Thinking History (London, 1991). The idea of memory as representation rather than recollection or retrieval is a major theme of the neurobiological literature on memory. See, e.g., Schacter, Searching for Memory, 56-60.
85. Hutton, History as an Art of Memory, 1-10. Moreover, as historians became more self-reflexive about their own representation of the past, they became better able to take more self-critical stances toward their nation's historical legacies.
86. Müller, "Introduction," 6;
87. Judt, "Past Is Another Country," 108;
88. Bill Niven, Facing the Nazi Past: United Germany and the Legacy of the Third Reich (London, 2002), introduction.
89. As Charles Maier put it in 1993, "At the end of the twentieth century, Western societies have come to the end of a massive collective project,... of the capacity to found collective institutions that rest on aspirations for the future" (Maier, "Surfeit of Memory?" 147).
90. Torpey, "Making Whole What Has Been Smashed," 241, 251.
91. Barkan, Guilt of Nations, xvi.
92. Müller, "Introduction." 4;
93. Niven, Facing the Nazi Past, 2-4. Whether in the form of political pronouncements of regret for the Nazi era, the creation of national holidays and memorials marking the Holocaust, economic measures to pay reparations to survivors (particularly slave laborers), or intense debates over historical monographs, memoirs, and museum exhibitions, the Germans took unprecedented responsibility for the crimes of the Third Reich in the years leading up to, and following, the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II in 1995.
94. Rousso, Vichy Syndrome; Georg Kreis, ed., Switzerland and the Second World War (London, 2000);
95. Richard J. Golsan, ed., Memory, the Holocaust, and French Justice: The Bousquet and Touvier Affairs (Hanover, NH, 1996);
96. Henry Rousso, "Justice, History, and Memory in France: Reflections on the Papon Trial," in Politics and the Past: On Repairing Historical Injustices, ed. John Torpey (Lanham, MD, 2003), 277-93;
97. Tom Bower, Nazi Gold: The Full Story of the Fifty-Year Swiss-Nazi Conspiracy to Steal Billions from Europe's Jews and Holocaust Survivors (New York, 1997);
98. Barkan, Guilt of Nations, chap. 5;
99. Paloma Aguilar, "Justice, Politics, and Memory in the Spanish Transition," in De Brito, Enriquez, and Aguilar, Politics of Memory, 92-118.
100. The renewed interest in the past was somewhat less self-critical in Eastern Europe than in Western Europe. This trend reflected the reluctance of newly independent nations to sully their newfound national pride by airing their dirty historical laundry in public. Most preferred to see themselves as guiltless historical victims rather than guilty historical perpetrators. In the former Yugoslavia, Serbs and Croats reembraced historical memories of being victimized by one another in the Second World War; Poles preferred to focus on their victimization by the Germans and the Soviets rather than their own complicity in the murder of Polish Jews, and Czechs predictably refrained from acknowledging the expulsion of ethnic Germans at the end of the war. Judt, "Past Is Another Country," 99-100.
101. See the controversy over Jan Gross's book Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (New York, 2002);
102. Antony Polonsky, The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland (Princeton, NJ, 2003).
103. David Cesarani, "Holocaust Controversies in the 1990s: The Revenge of History or the History of Revenge," in After Eichmann: Collective Memory and the Holocaust since 1961, ed. David Cesarani (London, 2005), 91-99.
104. Alan Steinweis, "The Auschwitz Analogy: Holocaust Memory and American Debates over Intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s," Holocaust and Genocide Studies 19, no. 2 (2005): 276-89.
105. The internment of Japanese Americans was confronted in the form of reparations, apologies, and new commitments to documenting this forgotten history at specific historic sites. Marita Sturken, "Absent Images of Memory: Remembering and Reenacting the Japanese Internment," in Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s), ed. Takashi Fujitani (Durham, NC, 2001), 33-49;
106. Robert A. Jones, "Whitewashing Manzanar," Los Angeles Times, April 10, 1996, B2. In the late 1990s, the topics of slavery and Jim Crow-era violence against African Americans gained attention, with elite universities probing their involvement in the slave trade, major newspapers apologizing for running advertisements for slaves, truth commissions established to probe early twentieth-century race riots, memorials erected for forgotten lynching victims, and larger discussions emerging in political circles about the possibility of reparations for past persecution. Yale and Brown were among the universities that confronted their slave-trading pasts. Kate Zernike, "Slave Traders in Yale's Past Fuel Debate on Restitution," New York Times, August 13, 2001;
107. Frances Fitzgerald, "Peculiar Institution: Brown University Looks at the Slave Traders in Its Past," New York Times, September 12, 2005;
108. "A Newspaper Apologizes for Slave-Era Ads," New York Times, July 6, 2000, B1.
109. On the Tulsa Race Riot Commission, see Madigan, Burning, chap. 16. The state legislature of North Carolina established the Wilmington Race Riot Commission to unearth the truth of the horrific pogrom against blacks in 1898. Brent Staples, "When Democracy Died in Wilmington, N.C.," New York Times, January 8, 2006, 13. Monica Davey, "It Did Happen Here: The Lynching That a City Forgot," discusses the lynching of three black men in Minneapolis in 1920 (New York Times, December 4, 2003, A22).
110. On the issue of reparations for slavery see Roy L. Brooks, ed., When Sorry Isn't Enough (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 341-61;
111. and Barkan, Guilt of Nations, chap. 12.
112. Peter Li, ed., Japanese War Crimes: The Search for Justice (New Brunswick, NJ, 2003);
113. Barkan, Guilt of Nations, chap. 3;
114. Fujitani, Perilous Memories.
115. Alexandra Barahona De Brito, "Truth, Justice, Memory, and Democratization in the Southern Cone," in De Brito, Enriquez, and Aguilar, Politics of Memory, 119-60;
116. Sharon F. Lean, "Is Truth Enough? Reparations and Reconciliation in Latin America," in Torpey, Politics and the Past, 169-92.
117. Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness, chap. 4;
118. Annie E. Coombes, History after Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa (Durham, NC, 2003).
119. On the memory of the Herero genocide, see the work of Reinhart Kössler, much of which is summed up in "Awakened from Colonial Amnesia? Germany after 2004," http://www.freiburg-postkolonial.de/Seiten/ koessler-colonial-amnesia.htm.
120. "Australia Expresses Regret for Injustice to Aborigines," New York Times, August 27, 1999, A14;
121. see Dirk Moses, ed., Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History (New York, 2004).
122. Paul Vallely, "A Sorry Business," London Independent, December 19, 1998;
123. "The Vatican and the Holocaust," New York Times, March 17, 1998.
124. Only the Middle East largely escaped the wave of historical self-examination. Although Israel witnessed the emergence of the controversial "post-Zionist" school of historians, which subjected reigning historical myths to critical scrutiny, most Arab and Muslim nations, being authoritarian societies, did not enjoy the same freedom of expression present in the newly postauthoritarian nations of the world and continued to adhere to distorted, if politically expedient, views of the past. See the special issue of History and Memory entitled "Israeli Historiography Revisited," vol. 7, no. 1 (Spring/Summer) 1995. The rise of post-Zionism can be partly explained by the comparatively secure post-Oslo climate of the early and mid-1990s.
125. Much of the literature is discussed in Jeffrey K. Olick and Joyce Robbins's essay, "Social Memory Studies: From 'Collective Memory' to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices," Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 105-40.
126. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (New York, 1983);
127. Pierre Nora's Les Lieux de Mémoire appeared in English as Pierre Nora and Lawrence D. Kritzman, eds., Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, vols. 1-3 (New York, 1996-98);
128. Yosef Yerushalmi's Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (New York, 1989);
129. Hutton, History as an Art of Memory, 1-10. Hutton cites the work of Philippe Ariès as inaugurating this field of scholarship, which also includes such works as Maurice Agulhon's Marianne into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France (Cambridge, 1981).
130. Hue-Tam Ho Tai, "Remembered Realms: Pierre Nora and French National Memory," American Historical Review, June 2001, 909, 912.
131. Peter Clarke, Hope and Glory: Britain, 1900-2000 (New York, 2004), 379-80, 386-87;
132. David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, 1985).
133. Nora, "Between Memory and History," 7.
134. Saul Friedländer, When Memory Comes (originally published in French in Paris, 1978), and Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death (New York, 1982);
135. Maier, Unmasterable Past; Segev, Seventh Million; Rousso, Vichy Syndrome.
136. See also Buruma's Wages of Guilt. Other works that followed in this tradition and examined the cultural and intellectual impact of memory include (to mention merely examples on the topic of the Third Reich) Alvin Rosenfeld, Imagining Hitler (Bloomington, IN, 1985);
137. Anton Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film (Cambridge, MA, 1989);
138. Saul Friedländer, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the "Final Solution" (Cambridge, MA, 1992);
139. James Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT, 1993);
140. and Ernestine Schlant, The Language of Silence: West German Literature and the Holocaust (New York, 1999). Other studies followed on the unmastered pasts of other countries, including Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory; Adam Hochschild, The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin (New York, 1994);
141. Tina Rosenberg, The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts after Communism (New York, 1995).
142. Other works that examined the links between memory and national identity included John R. Gillis, ed., Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton, NJ, 1994);
143. Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of the Israeli National Tradition (Chicago, 1995);
144. Alon Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871-1918 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1997). Theoretical works on memory included Assmann and Holscher, Kultur und Gedächtnis; Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge, 1989);
145. Iwona Irwin-Zarecka, Frames of Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective Memory (New Brunswick, NJ, 1994).
146. Listing even only the most significant studies from this wave of scholarship would exceed the boundaries of this article.
147. In 1987, the leading journal in the field of memory studies, History and Memory, was founded, and in 1998 Stanford University Press established its book series, Cultural Memory and the Present. Among the more significant conferences were "The Future of Memory," at Yale University in October 1992, "Germany, Jews, and the Future of Memory" at Princeton University in April 1999, and "Confronting the Past: Memory, Identity, and Society" at the University of California, Los Angeles, in January 2001. In 2007, the new journal Memory Studies (published by SAGE journals) was founded, and a new Internet listserve H-Memory was established. The first source readers on memory appeared as well. See Michael Rossington and Anne Whiteread, eds., Theories of Memory: A Reader (Baltimore, 2007);
148. and Jeffrey Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy, eds., The Collective Memory Reader (Oxford, 2008).
149. Winter, Remembering War, 8.
150. The question of whether any past can truly be "mastered" still awaits a definitive answer from scholars. Some, like Eric Langenbacher, have openly spoken about the possibility of closure. See Langenbacher, "Changing Memory Regimes in Contemporary Germany?" 54. By contrast, Charles Maier has written that "historical narratives finally end ... not when there is agreement on one narrative ... [but when] clarification is reached on two or perhaps three basic stories, whose representatives understand the issues that separate them.... and agree to live ... side by side" (Charles S. Maier, "Overcoming the Past? Narrative and Negotiation, Remembering, and Reparation: Issues at the Interface of History and Law," in Torpey, Politics and the Past, 302).
151. John Torpey, "Introduction," in Torpey, Politics and the Past, 2.
152. "Bravourös bewältigt," Die Welt am Sonntag, May 8, 2005. Bill Niven's Facing the Nazi Past is one of the more upbeat analyses of recent German memory. Already in 1981, Peter Steinbach described the Germans' postwar relationship to the Nazi era as a "radical confrontation with the past, singular in human history" (Peter Steinbach, Nationalsozialistische Gewaltverbrechen: Die Diskussion in der deutschen Öffentlichkeit nach 1945 [Berlin, 1981], 8). To be sure, dissenters exist. Some critics of Germany's new form of national identity have dubbed it a perverse form of pride in sin (Sündenstolz).
153. See Richard Herzinger, "Am Anfang der Wahrheit," Die Zeit, no. 51, 2003.
154. Torpey, "Introduction," 2.
155. Peter Reichel, Politik mit der Erinnerung: Gedächtnisorte im Streit um die Nationalsozialistische Vergangenheit (Munich, 1995), 326.
156. They will also face competition from the twentieth anniversary celebrations marking the collapse of the Berlin wall in 1989 and German reunification in 1990.
157. It was Germany's exclusion from the D-day commemoration ceremonies of 1984 that led Helmut Kohl to stage the controversial Bitburg ceremony of May 5, 1985. By 1995, however, Kohl was treated much more fraternally as one of the "Allies," being invited to London to the end of the war commemoration ceremonies on May 8 and hosting the leaders (or acting representatives) of England, France, Russia, and other countries in Berlin on May 8, 1995.
158. See Niven, Facing the Nazi Past, chap. 4. Still, the 1995 ceremonies were partially overshadowed by a controversial right-wing German manifesto, "May 8, 1945 - against Forgetting," which demanded that more attention be paid to German suffering during the war. By contrast, the ceremonies a decade later were quite calm, marked by the first-time inclusion of Germany at the June 2004 D-day commemorative ceremonies and the May 9, 2005, ceremonies in Moscow - both of which, according to Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, symbolically marked the "final end" to World War II and the postwar era. "For the Germans, the War's Ambiguities Persist," International Herald Tribune, June 7, 2004, 1;
159. Knut Pries, "Zyklus des Gedenkens," Die Frankfurter Rundschau, May 9, 2005.
160. To be sure, monuments will continue to be built at the local level in Germany but probably without the pathos or publicity of the Berlin debate.
161. "Germany Passes Torch to New Generation," New York Times, November 22, 2005, A3.
162. Richard Bernstein, "In World Cup Surprise, Flags Fly with German Pride," New York Times, June 18, 2006;
163. Roger Cohen, "Germany and the Cup: A Liberating Normality," New York Times, June 17, 2006.
164. Michael Bess has argued that France has mastered the legacy of Vichy. Michael Bess, Choices under Fire: Moral Dimensions of World War II (New York, 2006), 323. Yet the legacy of colonial rule in Algeria continues to haunt the nation.
165. See William Cohen, "The Algerian War and French Memory," Contemporary European History 9, no. 3 (2000): 489-500. In the United States, the legacy of slavery continues to spark calls for apologies and reparations.
166. See Jonathan Capehart, "Contrition for America's Curse," Washington Post, April 12, 2007, A27.
167. Japanese Premier Shinzo Abe's recent denial of wartime sex slavery caused outrage in Asia during the spring of 2007. Norimitsu Onishi, "Japan Repeats Denial of Role in World War II Sex Slavery," New York Times, March 17, 2007, 4. Russia's angry reaction to Estonia's dismantling of a Soviet-era World War II memorial in 2007 reflects the nation's ongoing reluctance to question its mythologized view of the Second World War. Steven Lee Myers, "After Violent Night, Estonia Removes a Soviet-Era Memorial," New York Times, April 28, 2007, A8.
168. See also Nina Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York, 1994).
169. See the New York Times editorial "Turkey, Armenia and Denial," May 16, 2006.
170. On China's reluctance to confront the crimes of Mao's Cultural Revolution, see "Ignoring the Past: China," Economist, May 20,
171. Helmut Dubiel, Niemand ist frei von der Geschichte: Die Nationalsozialistische Herrschaft in den Debatten des Deutschen Bundestages (Munich, 1999), 290, 292.
172. See also Barkan, Guilt of Nations, xi.
173. Economie motives were directly involved in Switzerland's decision to establish a five-billion-dollar fund for Holocaust victims who lost money in Swiss banks. Barkan, Guilt of Nations, xvi. Similarly, Montgomery, Alabama, has begun to market its progressive confrontation with segregation and the civil rights movement as a means of luring business to the city and region at large.
174. See Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (New York, 1998), 357-58. The NAACP's decision in 1999 to launch an economic boycott of South Carolina in order to halt the flying of the confederate flag over the state house in Columbia is another example of what might be called the "economics of memory."
175. Torpey, "Introduction," 3.
176. Tony Judt, Postwar, 829.
177. Charles Maier, "Europa Europa," Nation, January 9, 2006, 24.
178. This is the implication of Charles Maier's essay "Surfeit of Memory?" and John Torpey's essay "The Pursuit of the Past: A Potential Perspective," in Theorizing Historical Consciousness, ed. Peter Seixas (Toronto, 2004), 240-55.
179. To be sure, some historians have questioned whether 9/11 deserves to be seen as a point of rupture in the periodization of the twenty-first century. Niall Ferguson, "2011: Ten Years from Now," New York Times Magazine, December 2, 2001;
180. Joseph J. Ellis, "Finding a Place for 9/11 in American History," New York Times, January 28, 2006, A17.
181. This was Francis Fukuyama's assessment in the immediate wake of 9/11. "Francis Fukuyama says Tuesday's Attack Marks the End of 'America's Exceptionalism,'" London Financial Times, September 15, 2001, 1.
182. David Brooks, "The Death of Multiculturalism," New York Times, April 27, 2006, A27;
183. Amnon Rubinstein, "The End of Multiculturalism," New York Sun, May 1, 2006, 9;
184. John Lloyd, "The End of Multiculturalism," New Statesman, May 27, 2002, http://www.newstatesman.com/People/200205270012.
185. Francis Fukuyama predicted that the 9/11 attacks would "make American society stronger and more unified at home" ("Francis Fukuyama says Tuesday's Attack Marks the End of 'America's Exceptionalism'"). The same dynamic surfaced in other European nations that suffered terrorist attacks, such as England and Spain, as well as in other nations, such as Lebanon and Jordan, that witnessed mass demonstrations of people united against a common terrorist threat.
186. In France, in the wake of the banlieue riots in the fall of 2005, political elites are now trying to devise new ways to integrate young Muslims into the social and economic order. "Sarkozy Plans 'Contracts' for New Migrants," London Financial Times, February 6, 2006, 8. In Germany, politicians are reviving the old discussion about forging a German - or, as some prefer, a European - dominant culture (Leitkultur). "Why Europe Needs a 'Leading Culture,' Spiegel-Online, November 26, 2004;
187. Charles Hawley, "Germany's Pseudo Culture War," Spiegel-Online, November 23, 2004. Dutch political leaders in the Netherlands have begun to question the country's separatistic social order of "pillars," which has been blamed for keeping Muslim, immigrants from assimilating into the majority society. Christopher Caldwell, "Holland Daze: The Dutch Rethink Multiculturalism," Weekly Standard, December 27, 2004;
188. Maria Margaronis, "Dutch Tolerance Tried," Nation, December 20, 2004. And politicians in Great Britain have also, if controversially, called for British culture to become more homogenous. "Race Relations Chief Savaged for Call to End Multiculturalism," Observer, April 4, 2004;
189. "Multicultural Britain Is Not Working Says Tory Chief," Daily Telegraph, August 3, 2005.
190. To be sure, while support for identity politics may be declining within large sections of European and American society, it may actually be intensifying among Muslims worldwide.
191. Deborah Solomon, "Continental Drift," interview with Jean Baudrillard, New York Times Magazine, November 20, 2005;
192. Michael Roth's review of Keith Jenkins's Refiguring History, in History and Theory, October 2004, 378. Andreas Huyssen has agreed, writing that the "whole debate about postmodernism ... appears quite parochial today" (Andreas Huyssen, "Introduction: Modernism after Postmodernity," New German Critique, Fall 2006, 2).
193. Julia Keller, "After the Attack, Postmodernism Loses Its Glib Grip," Chicago Tribune, September 27, 2001;
194. Louis Menand, "Faith, Hope, and Clarity: September 11th and the American Soul," New Yorker, September 16, 2002.
195. David Kopel, "Uncertain Uncertainty," National Review Online, April 4, 2002, http://www.national.review.com/kopel/kopel040402.asp.
196. For another conservative prediction of postmodernism's demise, see Charles Colson and Anne Morse, "The Postmodern Crackup," Christianity Today, December 2003, 72.
197. Edward Rothstein, "Attacks on U.S. Challenge the Perspectives of Postmodern True Believers," New York Times, September 22, 2001, A17;
198. Elaine Showalter, "A Champion of Cultural Theory?" Chronicle of Higher Education, January 23, 2004.
199. Stanley Fish, "Condemnation without Absolutes," New York Times, October 15, 2001, A19. Rothstein replied to Fish in "Moral Relativity Is a Hot Topic? True. Absolutely," New York Times, July 13, 2002.
200. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity Question ' and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988). Novick discusses a period of belief in objectivity from the late nineteenth century to 1914, a new era of relativism between 1918 and the outbreak of World War II, a return, to objectivity from the 1940s to the 1960s, and a new surge of presentist relativism since the 1960s.
201. Eric Hobsbawm, "In Defence of History: It Is Fashionable to Say 'My Truth Is as Valid as Yours.' But It's Not True," Guardian, January 15, 2005, http://www.guardian .co.uk/books/2005/jan/15/news.comm.ent.
202. The scandals over plagiarism in academic scholarship and literature involving Doris Kearns Goodwin, Joseph Ellis, and Kaavya Viswanathan; the embellishment or outright fabrication of fact by novelists like James Frey and J. T. Leroy; the fraudulent reporting of journalists Stephen. Glass and Jason Blair; and the insertion of political propaganda into legitimate media outlets, whether by government-paid journalists like Armstrong Williams in the United States or U.S.-Army-funded Arab journalists in Iraq, have all inspired outrage.
203. Georg Iggers, New Directions in European Historiography (Hanover, NH, 1984);
204. Gertrude Himmelfarb, The New History and the Old: Critical Essays and Reappraisals (Cambridge, MA, 1987);
205. Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley, 1989).
206. Geoff Eley's article "The Profane and Imperfect World of Historiography," which draws on his recent book, A Crooked Line, recently sparked a discussion in the American Historical Review Forum about whether cultural history has reached the end of its influence and ought to be replaced by a return to social history. See the April 2008 issue of the American Historical Review, 391-437.
207. Searching the American Historical Association (AHA) Web site's database History Doctoral Programs by Name under the category "recent PhDs," I examined the titles of the dissertations produced by graduate students at the top twenty-five graduate programs in history (as ranked by U.S. News and World Report). I found fifty-three dissertations with "memory" in the title. (I deliberately kept my search narrow, fully aware of the fact that dissertations can focus on the subject of memory without having the term in the title.) These fifty-three dissertations were produced between the years 1991 and 2008. Of these, thirty were filed before the attacks of 9/11 (that is in 2001 or before), and twenty-three were filed afterward (2002-8). Within this latter category, most (eighteen) were filed in the immediate years after 9/11, meaning they were conceived before the attacks occurred. Only five were filed in 2007 or after, which is the soonest any graduate student could have completed a dissertation conceived after 9/11. The fact that forty-eight of fifty-three dissertations on memory were conceived before 9/11 and five were conceived afterward suggests a falloff of interest in memory. That said, a look at "current dissertations" on the AHA Web site lists nineteen dissertations underway with "memory" in the title. Adding this number to the five filed after 2007, a total of twenty-four dissertations have been conceived since 9/11. If we consider the fact that these twenty-four dissertations have been conceived in six years' time together with the fact that the forty-eight mentioned above were conceived in the ten years between 1991 and 2001, the falloff in production does not seem as dramatic. It suggests, indeed, that there will not be any crash of the memory industry but rather a "soft landing." For the AHA Web site, see http://www.historians.org/ projects/cge/PhD/AlphaList.htm.
208. Robin Wilson, "Job Market Is Hot for Now," Chronicle of Higher Education, January 27, 2006, 12. Advertisements for beginning faculty jobs in African history, e.g., were up 92 percent in 2004-5 over the year before, and jobs in Middle Eastern history were up by 64 percent.
209. See Eley, "Profane and Imperfect World of Historiography," 433.
210. Klein, "On the Emergence," 145.
211. See also Barbara A. Misztal, "The Sacralization of Memory," European Journal of Social Theory 7, no. 1 (2004): 67-84.
212. Maier, "Overcoming the Past?" 303;
213. Torpey, "Pursuit of the Past," 246-47.
214. See also David Hoogland Noon, "Operation Enduring Analogy: World War II, the War on Terror, and the Uses of Historical Memory," Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Fall 2004, 339-65.
215. For a larger discussion, see Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, "The Politics of Uniqueness: Reflections on the Recent Polemical Turn in Holocaust and Genocide Scholarship," Holocaust and Genocide Studies 13, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 28-61.
216. Judt, "From the House of the Dead," 16.
217. See also Tony Judt, "The 'Problem of Evil' in Postwar Europe," New York Review of Books, February 14, 2008, 33-35.
218. Maier, "Surfeit of Memory?" 151.
219. Weinrich, Lethe; Gross, Lost Time; Marc Auge, Oblivion (Minneapolis, 2004).
220. Kansteiner quotes Peter Burke's remark from 1989 that "neither memories nor histories seem objective any longer" (Kansteiner, "Finding Meaning in Memory," 184).
221. For defenses of memory's progressive political character, see Barkan, Guilt of Nations, xxiii-xxiv, 26;
222. Levy and Sznaider, Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age.
223. Aleida Assmann, "Europe: A Community of Memory?" Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, Spring 2007, 11-26.
224. See the reply by Peter Novick and Assmann's rejoinder (27-38).
225. Eric Langenbacher and Friederike Eigler, "Introduction: Memory Boom or Memory Fatigue in 21st Century Germany?" German Politics and Society, Fall 2005, 1.
226. Otto Friedrich, Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s (New York, 1995), xxi.
227. Daniel Radosh, "The Trendspotting Generation" (originally published in GQ, April, 1988), http://www.radosh.net/writing/trends.html; Malcolm. Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (New York, 2002).
228. Andrei Markovits and Simon Reich, The German Predicament: Memory and Power in the New Europe (Ithaca, NY, 2001);
229. Jan-Werner Müller, Memory and Power in Postwar Europe; Cara De Silva, In Memory's Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezin (New York, 1996).
230. Daniel Gross, Pop! Why Bubbles Are Great for the Economy (New York, 2007).